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It has been quite a journey. I just love that beyond writing a book that I can continue to share, motivate, and help educate others on achieving their financial goals through savvy money management, wise spending, and smart investing.

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How Much We Spend on Groceries

Our total grocery costs over the last three months amounted to:

September: $246.68

October: $206.35

November: $196.90

This doesn’t count eating out. We eat out once a month and we’ll spend anywhere from $60 to $90. We also work part-time in a fancy seniors home where we get to eat supper on the days we’re working, which is about three to five days a week. Before working there, our monthly grocery bill averaged out to be $360 to $420 a month and we went out for dinner twice a month.

It took us a few years before we were able to get our average monthly grocery bill down to what it is. JP and I have been living in Southern Ontario for five years now; it was a matter of trial and error, buying from the different grocery stores before we found where we can generally get the best prices for what we eat on a regular basis.

Our food costs are low for the following reasons:

We shop at two to four different places for the cheapest prices;

We’re vegetarians (don’t be hatin’!);

We make most of our meals at home, quick ‘n’ easy style;

We hardly eat packaged food;

We always look at the cost per unit;

JP is uncannily a savant with prices. He’s like a human app. I don’t know if this talent stemmed from watching stock prices so much, but he just knows when something – in or out of season – costs more than it should;

We add up our costs each month and compare our monthly spending.

Where We Shop

No Frills

This is generally the best place for most of our produce (bananas, oranges, onions, broccoli, kale, beets, sweet potatoes, potatoes, parsnips, avocados, tomatoes, cauliflower, squashes, carrots, etc). Here, we also get our spices, rice, pasta, beans, legumes, tofu, and canned tuna for our cats. JP eats salmon once in a while, so he’ll get the frozen packaged salmon when it goes on special. Every week, I bake our bread, so we get our baking needs here too.

We accumulate PC Points whenever we shop which gets us $20 off every three to four months or so. On your membership account, you can designate your preferred food choices. When you do this, they’ll notify you when your faves go on special each week and if you buy them, you get extra points. When we started doing this weekly points special thing, we started accumulating enough points to get money off on a regular basis. What’s also nice is that in case you miss the points specials one week, you can save them for the following week if you need to.

Although No Frills is connected to Independent and Superstore, the prices aren’t always the same from store to store, so we try to be mindful of that. We get our garlic, sauces, and vinegars from Superstore. I also like the prices and selection of personal care products at Superstore. Sometimes the food prices are cheaper at these places than they are at No Frills.

Comparable places for the cheapest produce are Walmart and FreshCo too. We’ll go there if it’s more convenient for us.

Costco

They tend to have the best prices for apples, mushrooms, spinach, lettuce, cheese, and eggs. We get most of our other staples here. We calculated that the amount we save on tea and coffee alone pays for the annual membership! Here, we get our oatmeal, coffee, tea, olive oil, canola oil, sriracha, mustard, hot chocolate, soy milk, milk, maple syrup, veggie burgers, edamame, tissue, detergent, toothpaste, and vitamins. I’m now off the local ice cream, but we were getting it here at such a good price.

This summer, I bought from here an inexpensive set of little tomato plants which I planted and grew in my backyard. From late-August to now (late November) we’ve enjoyed the reddest and tastiest tomatoes.

At Costco, we bought a 5L tub of Pink Solution, this extremely effective, non-toxic natural cleaner. About twice a year, they’ll have a vendor selling it. We’re going onto year 3 of using it and we still have 2/3rds of a container remaining. We use it to clean everything in our house. It cost us about $50 and it also came with this incredible grease remover and awesome stain-removing laundry bar. We just LOVE this stuff!

Bulk Barn

We get peanuts and xylitol sweetener here. Sometimes we’ll splurge and get raw pumpkin seeds, which aren’t cheap at all. But when you heat those seeds for 4-5 minutes over a frying pan on medium heat and add a bit of soy sauce at the end, BOOM! You now have the tastiest food to go with drinks!

Other Places

We live among farmers. So in the spring and summer, we’ll sometimes get our eggs, syrup, and veggies from the family-run farmer stand down the road. We also buy a massive bucket of honey one to two times a year from a guy down the road who sells honey for a local beekeeper.

How We Eat

We’re healthy eaters, however, we also can be pretty lazy when it comes to cooking. We’re huge fans of low-fuss cooking. We found that the only way to enjoy healthy eating is to make really tasty food using good seasoning and sauces.

I usually just stir-fry onions and veggies to eat with rice, pasta, legumes, tofu, and even oatmeal. JP likes to bake everything: veggies, squash, and even his salmon. It is our habit to press garlic and marinate it in olive oil and vinegar (apple cider and balsamic) with some seasoning. We always have a bottle of this garlic concoction to pour on top of whatever we’re eating. It’s a great way to keep your weight down and stay healthy when it gets cold. Once in a while, I’ll make a killer onion potato omelette to manage my carb cravings and to nurse hangovers. To manage chip cravings (at heart, I’m a chip addict), I make kale chips.

For meals that take longer to prepare, I’ll just throw on some Netflix and watch while I cook or bake. When we have people over, I’ll just use recipes from my Women’s Health magazines to change things up and try new food and ingredients.

We cook in larger amounts to last us two to three days. When we’re not at our part-time jobs, we’re working from home, writing, or doing stock stuff. Having delicious, nourishing food at the ready kills the need to nosh on junk food. Additionally, when you’re well-nourished, you don’t need to eat as much. I used to be a junk food junkie, but I know that proactively eating healthy will lead to a longer, healthier life. I still eat sweets and junk food once in a while, but it’s no longer a staple in my shopping bags.

If the life-extending, artery de-clogging way I eat grosses you out, I apologize! As much as I want to pursue wealth, I want to be healthy and youthful enough to enjoy my money for years to come. Many people find that the healthier the food choices they make, the more of their money they end up saving. How great is that?

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Growing up, I was quite cynical. I had an unhealthy outlook and lifestyle that reflected that attitude. This led to a lot of bad situations, poor health, and many regrets. Reversing an attitude means addressing the patterns that support it. This process can take a while. I’m coming to believe it’s a lifelong journey.

I think of good money management as just one aspect of life. It’s just as important as eating healthy, having an active, balanced lifestyle, and fostering positive relationships personally and professionally. I think most of us want to live a long happy, healthy, and financially comfortable life. To me, personal wealth and success exist because of a good balance among the following:

Having goals

Supporting these goals with well-thought out plans

Hard work, perseverance, and discipline

Living and thinking positively

Being kind and respectful

Pursuing health

Respecting your hard work through thoughtful spending

Constant self-improvement

Avoiding stressful choices

Managing to do these things all the time might be asking too much of yourself. However, it’s possible to make decent progress as we set bigger long-term goals and work towards them via smaller, short-term goals. Practice makes progress. The perfection we might be looking for actually exists in each moment along the way. Perfection is not a final, absolute state that appears at the finish line. All those small victories–whether or not they’re exactly what you expected–are what build you and your life.

The StickK Challenge to Lose Weight

Having said all that, I’m going to talk about the results of my StickK Challengewhich I just completed this week. It was a two-month long challenge where I was to lose a certain amount of weight. Health is a form of wealth, and for a bit, I had lost my way. Last summer I pigged out on way too much ice cream for two months and found myself in an unhappy place physically, emotionally, and mentally. I wanted to work off last summer’s indulgence to get back to my healthy weight. I needed the motivation of losing money to make it happen. And it worked! Kinda…

So this is how it works. You sign up with StickK and set your goal and the time frame you’d like to accomplish it in. You also put money on the line, so if you don’t meet your goals, you have to pay whatever amount you can’t bear to lose. You decide what amount is enough to motivate you to hit your goal. The challenge is not effective until you submit your credit card.

The challenge is broken up into increments. If you want to lose 10 lbs in 10 weeks, then you have to lose 1 pound per week. If you decided to put $1000 on the line, then you stand to lose $100 for each week you don’t hit your target. The money can go to someone you designate or to a charity of StickK’s choice. (Apparently, the people most successful with their StickK challenges were those who decided to pay someone they disliked.) If you meet the weekly requirement, you get to keep your money that week.

So let’s say on Week 5 you reported your weight, but you didn’t hit your target for that week, you only lost half a pound. You’re charged $100 that week. The following week, you’re expected to lose 1 pound — you’re not expected to lose 1.5 lbs to catch up. StickK adjusts the end goal but you’re still expected to lose weight at the same rate.

I was unsuccessful for two periods, so I had to pay up twice. I found when I was unsuccessful, I got more motivated to get more consistent with my level of activity, sleep, and healthy eating (helpful tip: garlic helps you shed weight!). The end result: I missed my final goal by a small amount but I’m now back in my ideal weight range; I also lost a bit of money in the process. Had I not done the challenge, that same amount of money might have been spent on the same not-so-great food I was eating.

The challenge was totally worth it. I’ve got a better awareness of how much more active I should be and how much more I could improve my diet. For a while, I thought I was already doing all the right things and that nothing was working anymore because something broke in the metabolism department. But as my workout guru, Jillian Michaels, says, “There’s always an ‘UP’ button.” I hit that button by using the fear of losing money to motivate me and that motivation took me to a happier, healthier, and stronger place.

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Whether you’re trying to aggressively pay off your debts or saving for some big goal (like buying a home), the principles of money management are very similar. In many ways, the way you live your life may seem the same because the key to long-term success is more about establishing good ongoing habits and making them a part of your regular decision-making process. In other words, all goals involve a plan, some structure, discipline in practice, the determination to stay on track, and faith in the process.

If you have debts, you can’t successfully pay them down without accepting and following these fundamental guidelines:

Get rid of the high-interest debts first and avoid incurring this kind of debt ever again.

When you make a loan payment, a big part of it goes to interest and rest goes to the principal amount that you borrowed. The higher the interest, the harder it is to pay off the borrowed amount. Paying off the high-interest debts first will mean paying less interest overall. Credit cards are typically the high-interest culprits. Once you pay off your credit cards, be sure to pay off the full balance each month going forward.

Consolidate your debts wisely.

You could reduce the high-interest debts by consolidating them into a low-interest loan such as a credit line with the bank. If you have student loans from the Canadian government, then you could be getting a tax credit back from the interest portion of your repayment — you may want to hold off on consolidating them with your other debts and pay these off separately.

If you’re not able to get a low-interest credit line, then proceed to pay off the debt with the smallest balance first (of course, while paying the minimums on your other debts). Once that’s paid off, then pay off the next smallest balance and keep going until you slay the rest of them. Some credit cards offer very low to zero percent interest for a limited amount of time (usually a year). If it’s realistic to pay the full balance off within those time constraints, you could consider transferring your other debt balances to such credit cards for a service charge. But please remember…

Do not increase your debts.

…just because you transferred your credit card balances to lower-interest options doesn’t mean it’s time to go shopping again. If you can’t take your own debt takedown seriously, then you can’t expect others to take your goals seriously. If the temptation is too much to handle, cancel those cards.

Cut your costs and spending every which way.

You must be ruthless when it comes to reducing your bills and expenses. There are endless ways to cut costs and the internet is bursting with budgeting tips. Paying off debts doesn’t mean enduring years of suffering. You can still have fun and reward yourself from time to time — you just have to spend wisely and get creative with low-budget options. I’ve created ‘Fun’ancial Tidbits to inspire wise spending and mindful money management. Additionally, it’s essential that you address any emotional spending habits that weaken your will (like gambling or a shopping addiction) because caving into these habits even just once will sabotage your efforts.

Have a good, solid budget that you can work with.

Some periods will be tougher than others as you tackle your debt. “Loan Payments” is going to be a major part of your budget for a while. If your budget is complicated, overly ambitious, and not realistic, you could be setting yourself up for possible failure. You should overestimate your expenses as it’s easier to end up with a surplus than it is to get blindsided by an unexpected deficit. It’s also a good idea to forecast your budget ahead by a few months to factor in upcoming events, birthdays, holidays, annual expenses, etc. That way, you can get more strategic ahead of time by reducing your spending further or picking up extra work to make up the difference or to catch up faster.

Get professional assistance from reputable financial institutions.

You might feel like your debt situation offers no hope. The folks at your bank are pros and have seen it all. If you’re shy about going in to talk to someone in person, you can call them and ask them for advice and they can provide service over the phone. They can advise you on your loan payment options and various strategies. These advisors can surprise you with helpful things you maybe never thought of. If you give them a chance to support you, you increase your chances of succeeding in paying off your debts.

Share your goals with your loved ones.

It’s understandable if you want to keep your financial woes a private matter; you either don’t want to stress others out or be judged by your problems. You might feel alone and get stressed out as you work hard to unburden yourself of debts. It’s nice to get emotional support from people who really care about you. With team support, you can share stuff, exchange money-saving ideas, and have low-budget gatherings. Heck, you’ll probably find out who your real friends are!

The journey towards financial freedom can seem long and arduous. You have to know that there are many folks out there, just like you, who have worked through seemingly impossible situations to pay off their debts. They put their minds to it, created a plan, and learned a new set of money management skills that set them up for financial success later on. Overcoming a hurdle like this will give you the confidence and good habits to successfully tackle your future goals.

Disclaimer

Investing involves varying degrees of risk. All content on this website is for information sharing purposes only. This information is not intended to replace the advice and services of licensed professionals. When making decisions on your finances, seek the assistance of competent professionals. The author of this site assumes no risk or responsibility for the investment decisions made by users and readers.